Edmund White Quotes

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

There is more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence - suddenly you go into a battle, suddenly you utter something passionate.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

I've been doing Shakespeare readings with my friends for years.

There's a way that white people and black people spoke in the '70s that is nothing like how they speak now. They spoke from a soul, actually. There's a singsongy way of walking and talking that's just different now.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

Throughout history, we have only moved forward when society has distinguished between traditional values and valueless traditions.

'Bradshaw's' is a lovely device for the time-travelling television presenter. I just hope that people buying it aren't doing so with the intention of plotting a tour of 21st-century Europe. They'll find quite a lot has changed since 1913.

Democratic foursomes don't work in the '70s like they did in the '60s, when there were fewer musical directions.

Can fiction teach us? Absolutely. Fiction has the power to illustrate place, era, and atmosphere in vivid detail. But it is not Anthropology for Dummies.

So when people say how horrible it is that Donald Trump is president, well, yeah, but we've faced a lot worse than this and our country went on to go from the world of 'Mad Men' to the world it is today, and that's what's going to happen now. That's what's going to happen in the next 50 years. We're going to be fine.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

Those cultural wars, Sexual Revolution issues are fading from the scene, and the coming generation has basically settled them.